By Christopher Lidom
KUCHING, Sept 5: The Sarawak Infectious Disease Centre (SIDC) will act as a platform to gather all researchers regardless of their origin.
In pointing this out, Deputy Premier Dato Sri Dr Sim Kui Hian said for this purpose, there would not be any politics involved.
“Research fields come from many areas, including the university, Ministry of Health (MOH), and the Sarawak government.
“It does not matter if the researcher is funded by the State government, Ministry of Health (MOH) or Ministry of Higher Education; researchers are the same people, and they work for science,” he told reporters in a press conference after witnessing the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signing ceremony between Sarawak General Hospital (SGH), Clinical Research Malaysia (CRM), and Novartis Malaysia held at Clinical Research Centre (CRC) Auditorium in SGH today.
He was responding to a question from reporters if there is a possibility that CRM would be integrated with the Centre to conduct clinical research on diseases that originated from virus infections.
Dr Sim noted that clinical research in the past was the university’s domain, which is why there is no news about MOH conducting it.
“But in early 2000, MOH has much to offer and got plenty of resources for doing research, and at SIDC, it will bring researchers together no matter where they come from,” he added. — DayakDaily
